THE NEW IRELAND.-XI.

THE CHURCH.

BY SYDNEY BROOKS.

Of all the questions that confront the inquirer into the realities of Irish life and conditions the most delicate and perplexing are those propounded by the Church. An Englishman especially has to burrow his way through whole mountains of prejudice and misconception before he can win to an even moderately unhampered view of the character, work and influence of the Irish priesthood. In England itself he has hardly a single chance of learning the truth. Somewhere in the back of the average Englishman's mind is a confused idea that practically all Irish priests are on the verge of illiteracy. He is told that the education they receive at Maynooth is of the most cramping and bigoted character and that it turns them out narrow, intolerant, drunk with power and unscrupulous in using it. He has been fed ever since he can remember on the preposterous fallacy that Home Rule means Rome Rule. He has heard of the oppressions practised by the priests, of how they wring from the poor the moneys that enable them to build magnificent chapels in the midst of a neighborhood of hovels, of their niggardliness in charity, of their exactions in the way of marriage and burial fees, of their lives of sloth and ease. He is inclined to put down three-fourths of Irish ills to the Irish priests. He regards them as the most dangerous kind of agitators. He ascribes to them the lack of moral fibre that is often charged against the Irish people. He is convinced that they and their power are the greatest of all obstacles to industrialism. He profoundly dislikes and distrusts their whole organization. He hears that no priest in Ireland will ever condescend to publish a statement of accounts, that the Catholic

laity are excluded from even the smallest share in the government of their church, and that, however praiseworthy individual priests may be, and however much credit they may justly claim for the miracle of Irish chastity, the priesthood, as a whole, is seditious, anti-economic and a blight upon the moral stamina of the people.

Before considering this indictment in detail, I should like to give a rough sketch of three priests whom I met in one of the northern counties. The first was Father M., the curate of a wayside village, a bustling, spectacled little man, some forty years old. I lay in wait for him at a railway station whither he was due to arrive from Dublin. What had taken him to Dublin? The very last thing that would have taken an English clergyman to London. Father M. had gone to Dublin to head a deputation from his district that was waiting upon the Chief Secretary for the purely secular object of procuring a government grant for a local railway. It was he who introduced the deputation and acted as its spokesman. All the details of the proposition, the engineering difficulties of the projected line, the route it should take, the cost of its construction, the resources of the districts it would tap, the objections brought against it by rival roads all this the priest had at his finger-ends. He unfolded the whole scheme to me as we sat in the parlor of the only really comfortable rural inn I came across in Ireland; it was not-need I add?-kept by an Irishman. And then the talk went on to other things, to books and education and village banks and co-operative creameries. Father M. showed me a few volumes he had picked up that morning at the second-hand bookstores by the Dublin quays. He was, he admitted, somewhat of a bookworm. He had a library of nearly three thousand volumes. The reading habit had clung to him since the days of his professorship in an Irish Catholic college. He had even tried to popularize it among his people by allowing them to take out volumes from his shelves, but the experiment had not answered. Was it, I asked, mainly a theological library? By no means. The theological books reposed dustfully on the upper shelf; novels, belles-lettres, the classics, Darwin, Huxley and Spencer mingled below. But his great hobby was the cooperative movement. There was very little about agriculture that he did not appear to know-" and why shouldn't I, being a peasant's son myself?" He had started a village bank; he had started a co-operative creamery; and both were flourishing institutions.

Goodness and practicality beamed from behind the little man's spectacles. That he had not the polish of the drawing-room was true enough, but in competency, in genuineness, in enthusiasm and in sound common sense he would have taken a place anywhere. As he sped homeward on his bicycle, I had an immense conviction that his people were in good hands.

And then there was Father M.'s immediate superior, the parish priest, a gray-haired, hearty, all-knowing veteran upon whom I unceremoniously stumbled while waiting his curate's return. His door was ajar, and a voice from the depths of the house bade me come in when I knocked. I found him sitting in a bare, disorderly room, a glass of water and a loaf of bread standing on the table amid a litter of books and papers. He held forth for a while on land and farming as though he were one of the Estates Commissioners. Then he passed on to travelling and told me how he had just returned from a tour through Italy. "Rubbing up your classics, Father?" I asked him. He hoped in reply that they did not need much rubbing up, and I quickly found that they did not. He was strong on temperance, one of the leaders in the campaign which the Church has somewhat tardily organized against the most pervasive of Irish failings. "His own," as they say in Ireland, had nearly all taken and kept the pledge, and the local publican was hard put to it to make both ends meet. Remember, we were six miles from any railroad, in a district not indeed very poor, but quite remarkably isolated. And here was this priest, a real father to his people, reading the classics and fighting drunkenness. He came down to the roadway with me in the pleasant Irish fashion and chatted for a while with my driver, criticising his horse and passing his hands down its legs with expert familiarity-a most adequate man, in touch with every interest of his people. In a near-by town I found a day or two later another type of priest, or rather a variation on the Fathe M. type. He was, I should judge, about forty-five years old, a zealous antiquarian who had written many books and pamphlets on the round towers, old crosses, ruined abbeys and castles of the neighborhood. But that was merely a side issue in his busy, practical life. He was a firm believer and an untiring worker in the cause of industrial betterment. The Department of Agriculture, as I have had occasion to explain, cooperates with local committees appointed by the county councils

throughout the country. This priest served on his local committee with assiduity and intelligence; I believe he practically ran it. But he was far from confining himself to these more or less official duties. Any project of material improvement that stood a reasonable chance of success had his active support. When I visited him he had just organized and completed what amounted almost to a house-to-house canvass of his town for the purpose of raising $50,000 to start a small linen-weaving mill, and of that sum $30,000 had already been obtained. To encounter three such priests within the space of a week-alert, level-headed, well-informed, intensely practical men, each trying in his own way to leave the world a little better than he found it-would have forced the most unmitigated Englishman to revise some of his preconceptions.

I do not say that these three priests were typical of the whole body, and even if they were, it might still be necessary to insist that an organization is something very different from the sum of the individuals who compose it. One comes across, as a matter of fact, many priests in Ireland who make a decidedly less pleasing impression, who are bullies, agitators, not over-scrupulous and unwholesomely materialized. But, taking them as a whole, they are a remarkable set of men whose chief shortcoming, in my opinion, is not so much that they abuse their unrivalled authority as that they do not always direct it to the best ends. The sons, in the main, of peasants, small farmers and petty traders, educated in a seminary that is exclusively theological, it is inevitable that their horizon should be narrow, their stock of knowledge and of culture inadequate to the position of variegated and almost undisputed power in which they find themselves placed, and that their manners and style of living should sometimes fail to set an example of refinement and finish. But they are almost invariably gentlemen in the essentials, if not in the accessories, of character and conduct; they lead the fullest and most human of lives; I have rarely encountered any men in whom the social and hospitable instincts were more developed; and in their relations with women their record is absolutely without stain. "They are no anchorites," an Irish lady has written, "no austere possessors of a spiritual joy far removed from human sources. They are men and brothers to their flocks; they are open-air persons; they love the gayeties of the country and the people; they dine

out; they are leading-one had almost said the leading-figures at weddings and christenings; they are sportsmen; they love a race-meeting or a game of cards; they enjoy a good dinner and

glass of punch to follow. Yet it is in the midst of his social, and one may say material enjoyments, that the high vocation of the Irish priest is, to my mind, so manifest. I have looked on at and taken part in hundreds of card-games where priests were among the players. In all my experience, I cannot recall one instance in which a priest was greedy, ill-tempered or anything but a gentleman and a sportsman, winning and losing with cheerful equanimity, and displaying the utmost patience with other players less well-mannered and good-hearted than himself. I have seen them on the race-courses, dispensing their wonderful hospitality, spreading geniality as they went about among friends and neighbors, "putting their bit" in a sweepstake, and enjoying their losing or winning with the same cheerful equanimity as at the card-table.

The priest in Ireland has not to struggle for power; it comes to him as a birth-right. Not only is all education in his hands, not only have the Penal Laws bequeathed to him a distinctive sanctity, not only is his office regarded with a reverence not altogether free from superstition, but his domination over the secular affairs and interests of his people is such as even the Spain of three hundred years ago scarcely excelled. What is it, indeed, that the priest is not? Spiritual shepherd, teacher, politician, land agent, family lawyer, man of affairs-from the cradle to the grave he touches the realities of Irish life at every conceivable point. On such a matter the impressions of a casual visitor must necessarily lack that intimacy of acquaintance which can alone give them value. I fall back on the ampler knowledge, the wide and sympathetic elucidations, of one who, though a foreigner, has made a profound study of Irish problems and has also the advantage of being a Catholic. M. Paul Dubois, in his "L'Irelande Contemporaine," is nowhere happier than in his analysis of the relations between priests and people:

"Under Elizabeth and Cromwell, under the Penal Laws, the priest suffered with the people. He remained faithful to them unto death and martyrdom. Thus were friendship and union sealed between priest and people. The priest gained forever the gratitude and veneration of the people; he became their guide, their friend, their protector, and won